I just received an email from a member that wanted to know why we count impressions when we say we count clicks. We do count clicks, not impressions, but I can certainly understand the confusion. It’s easy to get confused when first starting out as a marketer. I thought it might help others if I take a few minutes to explain the difference between clicks, hits and impressions since they are very common terms in the industry.

Clicks: What Your Ad Tracker counts is clicks. Actually, it’s a click-through. Any click on a tracking link that successfully clicks through our site is counted. Even if the ultimate destination (your site) is down or doesn’t load correctly.

This method of ‘click counting‘ allows for a very unintrusive and easy to use third party system of ad tracking.

Hits: Hits refer to the amount of traffic your page or site receives. We do not sell or generate hits and don’t recommend buying hits or traffic [see Buying Traffic Is A Waste Of Time]. The term ‘hits‘ has nothing to do with Your Ad Tracker’s service.

Impressions: Impressions are the number of times an image, ad or link is displayed. In most cases tracking impressions would require access to your site via a script of some type. The exception would be with images.

A great example would be our banner advertising program. The banner ad program, not to be confused with our tracking membership, keeps track of both impressions and clicks. To simplify it a little, lets say you purchased ten thousand banner impressions. Every time a page loaded that displayed your banner would be counted as one impression. The impression counts if it is clicked (or even noticed) or not. Clicks are not counted unless someone physically clicks on the banner.

Knowing these two statistics, clicks and impressions, allows the advertiser to determine click through rates which will help them determine if their advertising if effective. I won’t go into detail about that right now. Factors can very widely depending on target audience, the image used, ad position etc.. That is the basic difference between clicks, which we track, and impressions, which we do not track. (except when purchasing our banner advertising) and hits, which is just traffic and we have nothing to do with.

Tags: Helpful Knowledge